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Matt Holliday has been a St. Louis Cardinal since two years before Kolten Wong was drafted. By the end of the season he'll have played more games as a Cardinal than Mike Shannon or Vince Coleman; he's already played nearly 200 more than Scott Rolen. He made the transition from Flaky DeWallet Guy to dependable veteran so smoothly that there are talk radio callers out there who still don't realize they love him.

Two alternate universes over Matt Holliday was AU1) traded to the Padres who AU2) swapped retro ballparks with the city of St. Louis after a Fun Mayoral Bet gone wrong. Matt Holliday is the pride of Petco Park. They don't mind the way he plays left field.

Last night Craig Edwards did a lot of useful tweeting—I do not know how to use Storify, so I leave collecting them as an excercise for the reader—according to a very simple premise. Here it is: Good pitchers frequently pitch badly when they’re 23. Read his tweets and despair at just how long Randy Johnson was a pissed-off Looney Tunes strongman before he became the best pitcher in baseball.

Carlos Martinez skeptics who are also pedants will recognize this—along with my contribution to the genre—as a few half-hearted steps away from begging the question. Pitching badly when you’re 23 doesn’t make you more likely to become Randy Johnson, except insofar as earning a rotation spot when you’re young is a good way of identifying yourself as a prospect to future Baseball Reference users. The thing 23-year-old future successes and 23-year-old imminent failures have in common is pitching badly when they’re 23; our prejudice, in either direction, is smuggled in behind our examples.

But the formula works so well as a tweet because it reads like that exceptionally satisfying-but-incorrect argument while making a very mundane point. The Cardinals have a 22-8 record and a replacement level pulled down by a string of pitcher injuries. They have a 23-year-old pitcher. They don't need to know whether Carlos Martinez will turn into Pedro Martinez, only whether most useful starting pitchers have revealed themselves after a month. And so,

In starts 4-6 in his 1st year as a starter w/ the Expos, Pedro Martinez gave up 12 R in 16 IP. They let him keep starting. #unfaircomparison

Niko Vasquez (3) was in St. Louis last year. Well, the Gateway to the West. Well, Sauget. In 51 games for the Frontier League's Gateway Grizzlies, he hit .287/.409/.475. If you don't know who Niko Vasquez is, we'll have to start a few paragraphs earlier, at the 2007 draft.

I do not recall anyone ever being excited about Pete Kozma (1); from the instant he was drafted Kozma combined the low ceiling of a super-polished college star with the creaking-rope-bridge floor of a toolsy high schooler. He signed cheap. In the supplemental round they added Clay Mortensen (1s), who *was* a polished college star, and then they didn't draft another high schooler until the seventh round. The high-ceiling guy they drafted in between, with astonishing power and a first-round asking price and an inkling he might just go back and hit home runs in college again (Kyle Russell [4]), didn't sign.

Here in 2015, it turns out, we were right to be nervous: The only established major leaguers from the 2007 draft are Tony Cruz and Daniel Descalso, although Andrew Brown (18) has spread 144 games out over a few years and Michael Blazek (35) is working on it now.

The history of baseball is big and confusing; it's too strange to allow easy judgments, too misty and uncertain to offer clear answers, too serendipitous and interconnected to be ignored. But/and I am a small, petty man and it is hard for me not to conclude that Chief Wilson was kind of a jerk.

Chief Wilson hit 36 triples in 1912, when you could do that kind of thing, and now we will never have the tingling mid-June intuition that somebody just might break the single-season triples record.

Lance Lynn, 2014. Many thanks to Keith Allison for using the Creative Commons license on Flickr and so making indie baseball blogs' Facebook shares look much better than they otherwise would. (CC BY-SA)

Two explanations for why even avowedly anti-stats people tend to like Game Score, a Bill James stat from the 80s that counts up box score components and assigns a number to each start.

It’s now going on 30 years old, and today’s avowedly anti-stat people were 30 years younger when they first heard about it.

Game Score is built around quantifying the things we already watch for, rather than revealing the things we don't.

Bill James turns these stats out by the dozen—Hall of Fame Monitor is another. They’re not about the question of assigning value so much as they are tools to answer the smaller-bore baseball-fan questions that are often swamped by that one. “Starting Pitcher Rankings” is one of his new ones, an answer to this specific question: “Who is the best pitcher in baseball right now?”

Which is distinct from “Who will be the best pitcher from this moment forward?” or “Who was the best pitcher last year?”—t’s got much more in common with the individual rankings in tennis and golf. Without getting too far into the weeds, James uses an adjusted version of Game Score, discounted over time to produce this effect:

At 3%, 28% of the pitcher’s rating is based on what he has done in the last two months, 49% based on the last four months, 63% based on the last full season. That’s about the right ratio. MOST of the evaluation of a pitcher—over half—has to be based on what he has done in the last year.

The rankings, as of April 12, feel good to me:

Clayton Kershaw

Felix Hernandez

Max Scherzer

David Price

Madison Bumgarner

Johnny Cueto

Chris Sale

Cole Hamels

Jon Lester

Zack Greinke

Adam Wainwright

Clayton Kershaw then a gap, Felix Hernandez then a gap, and then a clutch of veteran aces and young stars tangled up behind: that’s a pretty good result for a descriptive stat.

The Cardinals’ rotation tracks well, too. Adam Wainwright began last year at No. 7 and climbed as high as No. 4 at the All-Star Break. John Lackey, who got as high as No. 9 in the Johan Santana era, has been all over the place, which makes him a good case study:

Year

4/1

7/1

Opening Day #1

2002

NR

186

Randy Johnson

2003

103

81

Randy Johnson

2004

64

68

Pedro Martinez

2005

52

35

Randy Johnson

2006

24

14

Johan Santana

2007

18

14

Johan Santana

2008

9

9

Johan Santana

2009

20

50

Johan Santana

2010

22

29

CC Sabathia

2011

29

65

Roy Halladay

2012

85

211

Roy Halladay

2013

NR

118

Justin Verlander

2014

58

34

Clayton Kershaw

2015

34

Clayton Kershaw

Now he’s No. 34. Michael Wacha is ranked 115, between stars on their way down (Tim Lincecum is just outside the Top 100) and workhorses on their way out (Justin Masterson, Colby Lewis, Edwin Jackson.) Players move fast that far down—he gained four spots after his first start.

But today the story—the thing this descriptive, just-for-fun stat is telling us that we may not have noticed ourselves—is that Lance Lynn is the No. 17 starter in baseball.

He’s gotten to where he is—just ahead of Jeff Samardzija and Jered Weaver, just behind Stephen Strasburg and James Shields—without any heroics. He wasn’t a top pick like Weaver or Strasburg, he wasn’t the centerpiece of a deadline deal like Samardzija; he’s stayed healthy and pitched well for three solid years, and the Starting Pitcher Rankings illustrate, among other things, how few pitchers are doing that at any given time.

So what does this mean? Set aside the huge fluctuations in ERA—his FIP has held between 3.28 and 3.49 this whole time—and Lance Lynn is hard to get excited about for precisely the reasons that he’s moved into the Top 20. The time to get excited about Lance Lynn was five years ago, when reports out of Memphis suggested, more or less out of nowhere, that he’d decided to stop being a guy with an 89-mph sinker and start being a guy with a 95-mph fastball. Since then he’s been about the pitcher we hoped he might be when those rumors got out.

But five years is a long time to be one pitcher, especially to be one good pitcher. Any occasion to recognize that is worth a moment.

Year

4/1

7/1

2012

NR

103

2013

82

51

2014

54

39

2015

20

On Opening Day 2012 Tim Lincecum, three years older than Lynn, ranked ninth in baseball. CC Sabathia was seventh. Ricky Romero was 14th, Ian Kennedy 15th, Yovani Gallardo 17th, Matt Garza 19th. In 2013 Matt Harrison was 27th and rising, and Trevor Cahill, 24 years old, was at 35. In 2011, Lynn’s rookie year, the climbers were John Danks, Jonathan Sanchez, Chad Billingsley.

They get hurt, they lose effectiveness, they bounce around, they founder with bad teams, they retire. Everyone starts his career not ranked and ends it, if he’s lucky, like Josh Beckett (No. 151) on a controlled descent through the ranks and out of sight.

ABOUT YOUR PITCHER INJURY FEAR CONSULTATION

Your Pitcher Injury Fear Consultation has been prepared specially for you, the Requester, in accordance with our pitcher fear policies. The Pitcher Fear Institute's patented Six Quadrant Fear Worksheet classifies your terror along several axes; for a complete view of your fear refer to the Total Fear Index, which distills those fears into one number.

Your pitcher injury fear consultation has been tuned to reflect your own fears, as recorded in the General Fear Worksheet, the Baseball Anxiety Test, and the Elbow Alphabet Projective Quiz, and as such may not correspond with tests taken at other times and by other people. Exercise caution when comparing your Pitcher Injury Fear Consultation with other Requesters.

ADAM WAINWRIGHT, RHP, ST. LOUIS CARDINALS

Requester presented with unlocalized concern about Adam Wainwright, a tall, amiable right-handed pitcher in the St. Louis Cardinals' rotation. Pitcher throws a 90-mph fastball; a mid-to-high-80s cutter, intermittently identified as a slider; and a mid-70s curveball. Pitcher's success is characterized by heavy reliance on breaking pitches to disguise an unspectacular fastball, with straight fastball rate falling to 40 percent in 2013-2014.

Pitcher struggled to remain healthy in the minor leagues before emerging as setup man on a World Series team the Requester referred to as "very bad, a very bad World Series team." In 2008 pitcher missed ~14 starts with finger problem; on returning in 2009 pitcher became a Cy Young contender by virtue of an increased strikeout rate.

Pitcher suffered elbow surgery in 2011; since returning in 2012 he has thrown 667.1 innings while ranking NR, second, and third in Cy Young voting. Pitcher was named Opening Day starter for the St. Louis Cardinals' April 5 start against the Chicago Cubs.

STATUS OF KRIS BRYANT

Kris Bryant was not on the Chicago Cubs' active roster during the pitcher's April 5 start against the Chicago Cubs. (Refer to the Kris Bryant Addendum stapled to the National Broadcaster Narrative Agreement at the back of this Pitcher Injury Fear Inventory.)

PITCHER PERFORMANCE

Pitcher threw six scoreless innings, striking out six and allowing five hits. Pitcher left with a 3-0 lead and received a win for his performance. Requester expressed tentative concern with pitcher's velocity. Compulsive behavior noted in Requester around the concept of "Strand Rate"; pitcher left runners on third base in 3/6 innings.

FEAR QUADRANT WORKSHEET

The Fear Institute's patented Six Quadrant Fear Worksheet classifies your terror along several axes; each is weighted before its aggregation in the Total Fear Index.

WORRY QUADRANT: GENERAL

The Requester will eventually die, as will the Requester's family and friends; existing social bonds are being weakened and pulled apart in favor of new and powerful ones we will not grasp fully until they're being pulled apart themselves. Pitcher's elbow ligaments, being matter, will tend toward disorder. There are articles about kids not liking baseball in the newspaper again. Kris Bryant is not a member of the Chicago Cubs, also. Worry Status Quadrant Score:Worries moderately founded.Worry Status Quadrant Weight:1/10

WORRY QUADRANT: PRESENT SEASON

Pitcher has thrown 468 innings since 2013, more than any other pitcher. Such usage, however, is a sign of pitcher's durability, which is additionally related to his extreme economy—he ranks second on his own team (behind Lance Lynn) in pitches thrown during that same period, and ninth overall.

While pitcher appears to be performing as well as he ever has, Requester's general caution is warranted due to age and injury history. Baseball Prospectus illustrates warranted caution with Collapse (25 percent) and Attrition (24 percent) rates indistinguishable from A.J. Pierzynski's. Worry Status Quadrant Score:Worries nonspecific to pitcher in question.Worry Status Quadrant Weight:8/10

WORRY QUADRANT: NATIONAL BROADCASTER NARRATIVE AGREEMENT

Pitcher is an old pro, always ready to take the ball when his manager asks him to and just as unwilling to leave the facility while performing poorly. Scintillating questions emerge when pitcher's professional nature and long major league tenure are compared to the dissimilar credentials of the St. Louis Cardinals' up-and-coming rivals, the Chicago Cubs, with whom there is no love lost.

Furthermore, pitcher represents an "anchor" in a National League Central division in which anything is possible, within the bounds of existing Major League Baseball traditions.Worry Status Quadrant Score:Tune in and find out, subject to national blackout restrictions.Worry Status Quadrant Weight:Novelty/Familiarity

WORRY QUADRANT: DREAM INTERPRETATION

It could be that the pitcher's recurring dreams about biting down on a mouthful of loose teeth, the pain and pleasure mixing at intervals until they cannot be distinguished, if they were ever separate at all, relate to the hard-won freedom that another season of recovery from elbow surgery would represent. Pitcher's recovered memory of showing up naked with the bases loaded and nobody out in the ninth inning of a close game was traced to tenure as setup man for Very Bad World Series Team.

Dream analysts determined that Requester's dreams about pitcher, but it wasn't pitcher, exactly, but Requester knew it was pitcher, in a weird way, and they were in school, but it wasn't school, were not related to current case and should be set aside. Worry Status Quadrant Score:Worries unfounded.Worry Status Quadrant Weight:0/10

WORRY QUADRANT: MIKE OLT

They wouldn't have put Mike Olt in this position if they didn't respect Mike Olt's ability to deal with it, correct? Maybe that's the best way to think about it. Mike Olt used to be a very interesting prospect in his own right, and should think about that if he needs to, when things get hard. Worry Status Quadrant Score:Worries founded.Worry Status Quadrant Weight:0/10

WORRY QUADRANT: PREVIOUS START

Requester's nervous intuition about pitcher's velocity can be traced, according to early research results, to pitcher's extreme reliance on cut fastballs in his initial 2015 start. 48 cutters at an average velocity of 87.5 swamp a fastball that, while only used 16 times and struck 12 times without a miss, reached 93 miles per hour.

Pitcher took advantage of a wide strikezone and cold conditions at Wrigley Field to keep perceived lack of "sharpness" off box score. While pitcher's reliance on the cutter (as categorized in the early research results) was extreme and bears further monitoring, it reflects trends that began concurrent with pitcher's 2013-2014 return from elbow surgery. Worry Status Quadrant Score:Worries largely unfounded.Worry Status Quadrant Weight:2/10

TOTAL FEAR INDEX

The Total Fear Index, which distills those fears reflected in The Pitcher Fear Institute's patented Six Quadrant Fear Worksheet into one number, is available as part of The Pitcher Fear Institute's FearPlus subscription-based paywall program.

For more information please see your Pitcher Fear Inspector for the Pitcher Fear Institute FearPlus questions and concerns brochure.

Author's note: I am a ways into the Very Long Book I'd like to crowdfund later this year. To prod myself forward and to assuage my neglected-blog guilt I'll be posting occasional excerpts from the draft.

If you can figure out a way to genuinely satisfy somebody with a sentence that begins "Your favorite player wasn't half as good as you think, but that doesn't mean he was bad", please write me care of my employer:

Dan Moore
Fangamer, LLC
4500 E Speedway Blvd Ste 33
Tucson AZ 85712

Revisionism isn't popular among the people getting revised, which is a good thing—it's a check against our natural and unconscious urge to explain the past as a story about how great we are.† (The one constant theme in the writing of historians is this: "From the time of Herodotus, history has been colored by pettiness, short-sightedness, and an obvious bias in favor of the prejudices and fashions of the present. Until now.")

At the same time it's hard, through every revisionist lens of the last 20 years or so, to see Lou Brock exactly as his contemporaries did. Go back before his contemporaries and you can't see him, either: The way baseball was played between Ty Cobb and Maury Wills suggests managers, players, and fans saw even less in stolen bases than we do.

Really there were 30 years, centered around 1975, in which Lou Brock could have been Lou Brock—a mediocre left fielder who struck out too much, who didn't hit the ball very hard, who knew how and when to run and was willing to press his luck—and he starred in most of them. He is not a Hall of Famer in the wins-above-replacement sense, but if he retired tomorrow with the same counting stats and kept himself out of the steroid morass he'd be elected again in 2022 or so.

Predicting next year's revisions is a sucker's game, but I'm a sucker: At some point during the parade of retired '90s Yankees, people who write Hall of Fame listicles will have to deal with postseason statistics, even though they are not included on Baseball-Reference leaderboards.

I understand that it's unfair to your favorite fringe candidate to do this. (Mine too!) I understand that we'll need to find a balance somewhere between valuing World Series at-bats as players and fans do and naming David Freese the single greatest third baseman who ever lived. I understand, even, that by valuing postseason at-bats for their ends at all you're forced to ask whether hitting .464 in a losing World Series has more or less value than hitting .300 in a winning one.

But that's one way to write history, I guess: Keep your eyes open to the compromises you're making to tell the story you believe from the evidence to be true, and then make the compromises.

For the most part your favorite player wasn't half as good as you think, but he also hit .391 in the 87 most important plate appearances of his career. I don't know exactly what that means. But if you think it should matter more than how bad he was for a 69-win team in 1978, I can at least buy that.

†: In the words of Cardinals fan and actual historian John Terry, "humans will misremember history again and again until the sun burns out."

I've learned a lot from reading Baseball Prospectus for 12 years, but the most useful thing, as a writer, is how they produce their front-cover teasers—the little fortune-cookie-fillers that sit across the middle of the cover, under player headshots but above the blurb from Billy Beane. It's the showstopping Baseball Prospectus magic trick, and it's so easy: You take a guy who had a better or worse season than everyone expected, and then you say his season will probably be worse or better this year. It's applying the benefits of regression to your writing without the costs, which mostly involve explaining regression to yourself and others.

Aledmys Diaz had a bad year, after several murky good ones, but the worst thing about his particular bad year was that it gave us no new information about a player who had very little to offer in the first place. (Joe Schwarz helpfully gathered what there was back up yesterday.) It's not like that with the other second-tier infield prospects. When Breyvic Valera was 22 he was putting together the emptiest possible .313 average between Palm Beach and Springfield; when Jacob Wilson was 22 he was hitting in Peoria, and then not hitting in Palm Beach.

When Aledmys Diaz was 22 he was performing a year's penance for pretending he was 23. Wilson's entire professional career—they were born a month apart—fits neatly inside the time Diaz has lost since his last season in Cuba, and looks a lot like you might have expected Diaz's to look.

What do you do, on your Baseball Prospectus cover, with somebody whose season wasn't better or worse so much as empty?

Aledmys Diaz's first season was surprising because it seemed so irrelevant; like all good Baseball Prospectus reversals, what we can actually take from it is the Chinese-curse certitude that players are rarely surprisingly anything two years in a row.

Something will happen to Aledmys Diaz this year. He will show that he's a prospect worth offering $8 million, or he will show that he isn't. If he vanishes again he'll vanish more forcefully. But for now—for the purposes of your Baseball Prospectus reversal—he is more invisible than he ought to be, and thus available to make you seem like a wizard to people who haven't thought about him since he signed his contract.

I have no reason to be optimistic—the point is that I have no reason to be anything, except aware—but I am. All that's left pulling the Aledmys Diaz bandwagon is the information communicated by the Cardinals' original investment, but most first-rounders (non-Kozma division) get a year or two further on that tank of gas.

Jim Edmonds retired with 68 rWAR. (You can probably find me waving around this extremely satisfying number—60 WAR being the super-rough in-and-out line for Hall of Fame discussions—in several posts on Viva El Birdos.) In 2012, still retired, his bat and his glove collapsed all at once, and he had 57.3 rWAR. He's gotten back in shape since then, to his credit, and although his wins above average have declined slightly he's now back over the 60 WAR line.

I don't bring this up because I enjoy scoring Andy-Rooney-style points on WAR; I don't even bring it up because I know it to have disproportionately affected Jim Edmonds. I bring it up because the Hall of Fame case for Jim Edmonds is marginal—it's not obvious and it's not simple, and much of it is carried in the wins that slosh around the rim of the bucket when we refine our defensive metrics or adjust our park effects. Cut 10 WAR from Albert Pujols's career—say, all the suspiciously brilliant defense at first base—and you've changed nothing. Donate it to Fred McGriff and you've made two Hall of Famers.

You should be nervous about making a marginal Hall of Fame case, in the same way you should be nervous when you begin drawing huge crowds to your fiery speeches about national unity in the mid '30s. Each one builds on the last until the thing moves under its own power; by the time you're done you've elected Jim Rice and above-average Red Sox are marching through your capital.

It's easy to make the case for one not-quite-great player as a Hall of Famer, and it's hard not to prove too much, to inadvertently make the case for ten not-quite-great players. You're duck-walking around the Groucho Marx problem, trying very hard to find the one club rarefied enough for your player that would have him as a member.

Almost three quarters of position players with 70 WAR are in the Hall of Fame; about two-thirds of position players with 60 WAR; a little over half of position players with 50 WAR.

Jim Edmonds bobs up and down in the part of this chart where we are asked to draw a line somewhere between Richie Ashburn (63.4) and Willie Davis (60.5) and Bobby Abreu (59.9) and Darrell Evans (58.5) and Robin Ventura (55.9), among others. Even up where he used to sit there's Kenny Lofton (68.2) and Graig Nettles (68) and Duke Snider (66.5) and Buddy Bell (66.1). And I haven't even gotten to FanGraphs yet, or to the Veterans Committee picks that dot the 40s and 30s and 20s of the WAR rolls.

We can and should cut down the noise—and hopefully not too much of the signal—by looking at other things: his place relative to other center fielders, his disproportionate number of wins above average, rather than replacement level. But what we're getting at by then is not, or not entirely, a dispassionate analysis of the facts. It's an attempt (mostly successful and mostly justified) to read onto the facts our sense that Jim Edmonds—almost entirely during the five years between 2000 and 2004—was as good as nearly anybody, and that that should mean something.

And when we begin describing Jim Edmonds as a Hall of Famer this way we're accepting (finally) that our Hall of Fame campaign requires its own set of standards, and not just a broadside against the ones our predecessors came up with. It's not enough to find that Jim Edmonds is as good as a lot of Hall of Famers, and that on center field leaderboards he is all that stands between Ken Griffey, Jr., and the rest of the universe.

For going on 10 years of Jim Edmonds Hall of Fame advocacy I stopped there, and I have the continuing evolution of WAR to thank for pushing me to recognize that in believing Jim Edmonds is a Hall of Famer I am advocating for other things, as well—a somewhat larger hall, maybe, or one that adjusts the balance between career-long greatness and momentary brilliance, but nothing so simple as an objectively smarter and better one than everybody else's.

A Hall of Fame is supposed to be a celebration of the very best a field has to offer, and given enough voters of different backgrounds and preferences maybe it can be. In practice, though, mostly alone, we spend our time carving adjectives onto the plaques we don't share in common. Our Halls of Fame spring up around our marginal Hall of Famers.

Jim Edmonds is mine. 60 WAR sounds about right because he has it; focusing on peak greatness works for me because that's one of the things I most want to remember about the players I loved watching. If your Hall of Fame is different from mine I'll bet I find a different marginal Hall of Famer at the back of it, and a different picture of baseball fandom, and that's why they give both or neither of us a vote.

Legends are tainted by stubborn good-faith attempts to make them loom larger in memory than they did in life; every time a boomer insists that nobody made real music before or after the Beatles a millennial is born who will wince every time "A Day in the Life" begins to play. Every time Sunny Jim Bottomley comes up, Sunny Jim Bottomley who hit 20 triples and 31 home runs in a season, who once drove in 12 runs in a game, it's as an example of somebody who shouldn't be a Hall of Famer. His admirers polished his reputation until the finish rubbed off.

There are standards for the Hall of Fame, then, and we can find them by looking at what's come before us—but we change them by looking at them in a way that's maddening when the solid parts of your case, the numbers that gave you a reason to push forward, shift and settle too.

Jim Edmonds wasn't as good as Ken Griffey, Jr, and he wasn't obviously better, as far as I can tell, than Kenny Lofton or Carlos Beltran or Andruw Jones. He could be an excellent Hall of Famer, neither the best selection nor the worst omission the voters will make in the next five years. And silhouetted against his peers he was a remarkable player, daring and reckless and inexplicably patient. Anyone who actually gambled as much as Jim Edmonds seemed to—swinging at a high fastball, chasing a pitch he should play off the wall—would have run out of his hitting coach's patience or through a brick wall by 25. At 25 Jim Edmonds was, instead, in the process of discovering whatever it was that cheated the house out of its advantage until he was 40—the marked cards, the extra information we didn't have when his heel popped up and he readied himself to swing at a pitch that seemed hopeless from where we sat.

The numbers justify his election, but they don't justify the campaigning, all the posts and tweets we'll make supporting it and the comments we'll leave when voters don't. Electing him is only the beginning; Frankie Frisch, backed by the full faith and credit of the Veterans Committee, could not make us care about Ross Youngs. We'll have to pass along the numbers, and the memories, and all the highlight videos. We'll have to explain why Jim Edmonds is a Hall of Famer, and then we'll have to explain what a Hall of Famer is.